Our journey from Omaha to St. Louis was down the valley of t_In to the Yukon

a night's ride. We crossed the mighty river over an enormously high

bridge and then followed the crest of an equally lofty embankment across

several miles of wide, rich bottoms to Council Bluffs, in the State of

Iowa. "Nobody dares fool with the Missouri," a man said to me in Omaha,

as he pointed out where the voracious river was boldly eating up a wide,

black-soiled meadow in spite of the square rods of willow mats and tons

of rocks that had been laid down to prevent it. "When the Missouri

decides to swallow up a bottom, or a village, or a town, she just does

it, there is no escape." And even the citizens of Omaha do not sleep

well of nights when the mighty brown tide fumes too angrily. Hence the

extraordinarily high bridge and enormous embankment we traversed when we

sought to cross over to dry land in Iowa. The waters of the Missouri are

as swift as those of the Yukon, but the river flows for a thousand miles

through the soft muds of the Western prairies, instead of through the

banks of firm gravel, and it eats its way here and there when and where

it chooses, and no man can prevent. Hence the railways, while they

traverse the general course of the great valley of the Missouri, do not

dare follow too closely the river banks, but they rather keep far away

and have just as little to do with the treacherous stream as they may.

So it was we did not see much more of the Missouri, but sped into wide,

flat, rich stretches of alluvial country until darkness fell upon us and

night shut out all suggestions of the river.

When morning dawned we were among immense fields of tall corn, corn so

high as to quite hide a horseman riding through it. The farm-houses were

large and substantial. The farmstead buildings were big and trim. The

cattle we saw were big, the hogs were big, the fowls were big. And over

all there brooded a certain atmosphere of big contentedness. We were in

the State of Missouri, and passing through some of its richest, most

fruitful, fertile farming lands. A rich land of rich masters, once

tilled by slave labor, a land still rich, still possessed by owners

well-to-do and yielding yet greater crops under the stimulus of labor

that is free.

When we had retired for the night our car was but partially filled. When

we awoke in the morning, and I entered the men's toilet-room, I found it

full of big, jovial, Roman priests. Our car was packed with them. They

had got in at every station; they continued to get in until we reached

St. Louis. The eminent Roman prelate, the Right Reverend Archbishop of

St. Louis, Kain, once Bishop of Wheeling, had surrendered his great

office to the Pope, and the churchly fathers of all the middle West were

gathering to St. Louis, to participate in the funeral pageant. A couple

of young priests were talking about the "old man," while a white-haired

father spoke of "His Eminence," and I learned that Cardinal Gibbons, of

Baltimore, was expected to also attend the funeral ceremonies.

We breakfasted on the train, and in the dining-car sat at table with two

brother Masons wearing badges, and from them I learned that they were

also traveling to St. Louis, there to attend the great meeting of the

Grand Lodge of the State of Missouri. The city would be full of Masons,

and the ceremonies of the Masonic Order and of the Roman Church would

absorb the attention of St. Louis for the next few days. And so we found

it, when we at last came to a stop within the great Central Railway

Station--next to that of Boston, the largest in the world--where we

observed that the crowd within it was made up chiefly of men wearing the

Masonic badges, their friends and families, and the round-collared

priests. A strange commingling and only possible in America. In Mexico,

a land where the Roman Church dominates, though it no longer rules, the

Masons do not wear their badges or show outward token of their fraternal

bonds. In England, where the king is head of the Masonic Order, there,

until the last half century, the Roman Catholic subject might not vote

nor hold office. Here in St. Louis, in free America, I saw the two

mixing and mingling in friendly and neighborly comradeship.

I do not know whether you have ever been in St. Louis, but if you have,

I am sure you have felt the subtle, attractive charm of it. It is an old

city. It was founded by the French. The old French-descended families of

to-day talk among themselves the language of La Belle France. For a

century it has been the Mecca of the Southern pioneer, who found in it

and about it the highest northern limit of his emigration. Missouri was

a slave state. St. Louis was a Southern slave-served city. The

Virginians, who crossed through Greenbrier and flat-boated down the

Kanawha and Ohio, settled in it or went out further west from it. Alvah,

Charles and Morris Hansford, the Lewises, the Ruffners, made their

flatboats along the Kanawha and floated all the way to it. St. Louis

early acquired the courtly manners of the South. She is a city to-day

which has preserved among her people much of that Southern savor which

marks a Southern gentleman wherever he may be. St. Louis is

conservative; her French blood makes her so. She is gracious and

well-mannered; her southern founders taught her to be so. And when the

struggle of the Civil War was over, and the Union armies had kept her

from the burning and pillaging and havoc and wreck that befell her more

southern sisters, St. Louis naturally responded to the good fortune that

had so safely guarded her, and took on the renewed energy and

wealth-acquiring powers of the unfolding West. The marvelous

developments of the Southwest, and now of Mexico, by American railroad

extension, has built up and is building up St. Louis, just as the great

Northwest has poured its vitalizing energies, its boundless wheat crops,

into Chicago. Corn and cattle and cotton have made St. Louis, and

Spanish is taught in her public schools. Chicago may be the chief of the

cities upon the great lakes; St. Louis must forever remain the mistress

of the commerce and trade and wealth of the great Mississippi basin,

with New Orleans as her seaport upon the south, Baltimore, Newport News,

Norfolk on the Chesapeake Bay, her ports upon the east. St. Louis is

self-contained. She owns herself. Most of the real estate in and out of

St. Louis is owned by her citizens. Her mortgages are held by her own

banks and trust companies. Chicago is said to be chiefly owned by the

financiers of Boston and New York. The St. Louisian, when he makes his

pile and stacks his fortune, builds a home there and invests his hoard.

The Chicagoan when he wins a million in the wheat pit or, like Yerkes,

makes it out of street railway deals, hies himself to New York and

forgets that he ever lived west of Buffalo.

Hence, you find a quite different spirit prevailing among the people of

St. Louis from Chicago. This difference in mental attitude toward the

city the stranger first entering St. Louis apprehends at once, and each

time he returns to visit the great city, that impression deepens. I

felt it when first I visited St. Louis just eleven years ago, when

attending the first Nicaragua Canal Convention as a delegate from West

Virginia. I have felt it more keenly on every occasion when I have

returned.

The Great Union Depot of St. Louis is the pride of the city. It was

designed after the model of the superb Central Bahnhof of Frankfort on

the Main, in Germany, the largest in Europe, but is bigger and more

conveniently arranged. In the German station, I noted a certain

disorderliness. Travelers did not know just what trains to enter, and

often had to climb down out of one car to climb up into another, and

then try it again. Here, although a much greater number of trains come

in and go out in the day, American method directs the traveler to the

proper train almost as a matter of course.

From the station we took our way to the Southern Hotel, for so many

years, and yet to-day, the chief hostelry in the city. A building of

white marble, covering one entire block, with four entrances converging

upon the office in the center. Here the Southern planters and

Mississippi steamboat captains always tarry, here the corn and cattle

kings of Kansas and the great Southwest congregate. The politicians of

Missouri, too, have always made the Southern a sort of political

exchange. Other and newer hotels, like the Planters, have been built in

St. Louis, but none has ever outclassed the Southern. We were not

expecting to tarry long at the hotel, nor did we, for after waiting

only a short interval in the wide reception-room, a carriage drove up, a

gracious-mannered woman in black descended, and we were soon in the

keeping of one of the most delightful hostesses of old St. Louis. Her

carriage was at our command, her time was ours, her home our own so long

as we should remain. And we had never met her until the bowing hotel

clerk brought her smiling to us. So much for acquaintance with mutual

friends.

The morning was spent visiting the more notable of the great retail

stores, viewing the miles of massive business blocks, watching the

volume of heavy traffic upon the crowded streets. At noon we lunched

with our hostess in a home filled with rare books and objects of art,

collected during many years of foreign residence and travel, and I was

taken to the famous St. Louis Club, shown over its imposing granite

club-house, and put up there for a fortnight, should I stay so long.

In the afternoon we were driven through the sumptuous residence section

of the city out toward the extensive park on whose western borders are

now erected the aggregation of stupendous buildings of the Louisiana

Purchase Exposition. This residence section of St. Louis has always been

impressive to me. There is so much of it. The mansions are so diverse in

architecture, so splendid in design. "Palaces," they would be called in

England, in Germany, in France. Here the plain St. Louisian says "Come

up to my house," and walks you into the palace with no ado. Evidences of

the material wealth of this great city they are. Not one, not two, but

tens and hundreds of palatial homes. Men and women live in them whom you

and I have never read about, have never heard about, will never know

about, yet there they are, successful, intelligent, influential in the

affairs of this Republic quite as much so as you and I. And the larger

part of these splendid mansions are lived in by men and women who

represent in themselves that distinctively American quality of "getting

on." One granite palace pointed out to me, is inhabited by a man and his

wife, neither of whom can more than read and write. Yet both are gifted

with great good sense, and he lives there because he saved his wages

when a chore hand in a brewery until at last he owned the brewery.

Another beautiful home is possessed by a man who began as a day laborer

and then struck it rich digging gold in the Black Hills. Calves and

cattle built one French chateau; corn, plain corn, built several more,

and cotton and mules a number of others. Steamboats and railways, and

trade and commerce and manufactures have built miles of others, while

the great Shaw's Botanical Garden, established and endowed and donated

to the city, came from a miserly bachelor banker's penchant to stint and

save. The incomes of the hustling citizens of St. Louis remain her own;

the incomes of the rent-payers of Chicago, like the interest on her

mortgages, go into the pockets of stranger owners who dwell in distant

cities in the East.

The extensive Fair grounds and Exposition Buildings were driven upon and

among. A gigantic enterprise, an ambitious enterprise. St. Louis means

to outdo Chicago, and this time Chicago will surely be outdone. The

buildings are bigger and there are more of them than at Chicago. They

are painted according to a comprehensive color scheme, not left a

blinding white, less gaudy than the French effort of 1900, more

harmonious than the Pan-American effects at Buffalo two years ago. The

prevailing tints are cream white for the perpendicular walls and

statuary, soft blues, greens, reds, for the roofs and pinnacles, and

much gilding. More than twenty millions of dollars are now being

expended upon this great Exposition show. For one brief summer it is to

dazzle the world, forever it is to glorify St. Louis. The complacent St.

Louisian now draws a long breath and mutters contentedly, "Thank God,

for one time Chicago isn't in it." The Art buildings alone are to be

permanent. They are not yet complete. I wonder whether it will be

possible to have them as splendidly sumptuous as were the marble Art

Palaces I beheld in Paris three years ago--the only works of French

genius I saw in that Exposition that seemed to me worthy of the

greatness of France. The Exposition grounds and buildings are yet in an

inchoate condition, and but for the fact that Americans are doing and

pushing the work, one would deem it impossible for the undertaking to

be completed within the limited time. As it is, many a West Virginian

and Kanawhan will next summer enjoy to the full these evidences of

American power.

In the late afternoon we were entertained at the Country Club, a

delightful bit of field and meadow and woodland, a few miles beyond the

city. Here the tired business man may come from the desk and shop and

warehouse and office, and play like a boy in the sunshine and among

green, living things. Here the young folk of the big city, some of them,

gather for evening dance and quiet suppers when the summer heat makes

city life too hard. Here golf and polo are played all through the milder

seasons of the year. We were asked to remain over for the following day,

when a polo match would be played. We should have liked to see the

ponies chase the ball, but our time of holiday was coming to an end. We

might not stay.

In the evening we were entertained at a most delightful banquet. A large

table of interesting and cultivated people were gathered to meet

ourselves. We had never met them before, we might never meet them again,

but for the brief hour we were as though intimates of many years.

All the night we came speeding across the rolling prairie lands of

Illinois and Indiana into Ohio. A country I have seen before, a

landscape wide and undulating, filled with immense wheat and corn

fields. The home of a well-established and affluent population. The

sons and grandsons of the pioneers who, in the early days of the last

century, poured in from all quarters of the East, many Virginians and

Kanawhans among the number. A country from which the present younger

generations have gone and are now going forth into the land yet further

west, and even up into the as yet untenanted prairies and plains of the

Canadian north.

In the morning we were in Cincinnati and felt almost at home. The city,

smoky as usual, marred by the blast of the great fire of the early

summer. The throngs upon the streets were just about as numerous, just

about as hustling as those elsewhere we have seen, yet there was a

variation. The men not so tall, more chunky in build, bigger round the

girth, stolid, solid. The large infusion of German blood shows itself in

Cincinnati, even more than in St. Louis, where the lank Westerner is

Our journey from Omaha to St. Louis was down the valley of the Missouri,